A single mother. A woman’s-rights activist. The next president of Afghanistan?

CNN reports Fawzia Koofi, the first woman elected to that country’s Parliament, is vying to win the 2014 presidential election, despite repeated death threats from the Taliban.

“It’s a very difficult life for a woman, to be a woman alone in Afghanistan, to be a mother, to be a single mother and to be a woman politician,” Koofi, the mother of two daughters, ages 10 and 12, and the author of a new memoir, The Favored Daughter,  tells the network. “I get overwhelmed. I get overwhelmed 10 times a day.”

But fighting for the rights of women and girls and social causes keeps her campaigning.

“Our daughters are like the hope, the future of Afghanistan,” Koofi tells CNN. “I think women have to stand up, they have to raise their voice, demonstrate that they have equal abilities in this country like many other people have.”

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